Welcome to the second episode of “The Mediatwits,” the new revamped longer form weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift’s Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week’s show looks at the repercussions of the $39 billion buyout of T-Mobile USA by AT&T. Rafat has had both services and will stick by AT&T, but Mark is making the move from AT&T to Verizon. Plus, Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns, the authors of the book Tweets from Tahrir, were special guests on the show, explaining how they got their book to print so fast. Finally, MediaShift poll results showed that nearly 90% of respondents would not pay for NYTimes.com content at the current high prices.
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Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio’s Music Alley. “iPhone Blues” by The Temps.
Here are some highlighted topics from the show:
AT&T buys T-Mobile
2:20: Mark sings the “iPhone Blues”
3:40: Rafat compares T-Mobile in L.A. to AT&T in NYC
5:50: Media companies will lose a big cell phone advertiser
7:20: Google makes deal to supply Sprint with Google Voice
10:20: Rafat will stick with AT&T
“Tweets from Tahrir”
13:10: Nadia Idle talks about her trip to Tahrir Square
17:45: Alex Nunns says they got permission from all tweeters to use their tweets in book
21:15: What’s up with the @HosniMubarak feed?
24:30: Nadia will return to Egypt in May with books in hand
26:00: Mark and Rafat discuss print-on-demand aspect of the book
NYTimes.com pay wall
29:50: NY Times execs pooh-pooh people hacking the wall
33:50: MediaShift poll results on people paying for access to NYTimes.com
35:45: Rafat happy that companies are trying revenue models
More Reading
What does AT&T’s T-Mobile merger mean to you? at News.com
Lawmaker: Make Net Neutrality A Condition Of AT&T/T-Mobile Merger at MediaPost
AT&T’s Pitch for Free Mobile at WSJ
“Tweets from Tahrir” book from ORBooks.com
‘Tweets From Tahrir’ Collects Egypt Posts in a Book at NY Times Media Decoder
New York Times Paywall Breached With Four Lines of Code at PC Mag
A Note to Our Readers on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting at NY Times
Be sure to vote in the MediaShift poll about the AT&T/T-Mobile buyout:
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.